The Music of Hindostan c11.4

c11.4

the mordents show where he places the *mūrchhaṇas* (grace notes), and the *mūrchhaṇa* comes as a rule on the *aṃśa*; as these *mūrchhaṇas* are generally a Fourth or a Fifth apart the list confirms the view that the *aṃśa* was placed at the limits of the tetrachords. The list in the fourth column was given me, in response to a request for the thirty commonest and most popular *Rāgs*, by Upendrakisor Ray of Calcutta; and of these he named Nos. 2, 10, 11, 14, 32, and 60 as quite the commonest of all. ‘This list’, he writes, ‘was obtained by analysing a collection of more than one thousand songs. But its value is somewhat impaired by the fact that most of these songs were popular, not classical. Writers of popular songs are not always good musicians, so their opinion as to the *rāgas* has to be accepted with some reserve; the “popular” Behāg, for instance, is C D E F G A B♭ C, popular Lalit is C D♭ E F G A♭ B C, popular Multān is C D E♭ E♮ F G A♭ A♮ B♭ B♮ C’ (as compared with Nos. 60, 42, and 41). With regard to the descriptive epithets, which are interesting to compare, and which on the whole agree with those of the second column, he says—‘I give them with a good deal of diffidence; in fact I am not very sure about the majority of them. The quality of restraint is a predominating feature of Indian music, and this precludes any free exhibition of the emotions. Our gaiety and sadness often merge into each other: our most impassioned passages fail to stir anybody up. There is any amount of enjoyment of the deepest kind, but it is undemonstrative and reposeful; it leads not to action but to abstraction.’